Happy Birthday! Well not to me but to the tobam Project which I decided to revive and make new on 21st February last year, I'm only now releasing the blog now since I had my vacation days planed not working.
The last year has been very insightful in terms of programming knowledge, I learned new Patterns, strategies and approaches to solve problems, reaching across different aspects of computer science. Of course there have been set backs, annoyances and loss of motivation but large scale projects are about the journey and I won't give up just because it doesn't work the way I want it to. I had to learn that programming a game in the way I want too involved more than just writing the game itself but also the ecosystem around it. The advantage being that now, if numbers don't seem balanced changing them is merely going through the webui and changing the formulas associated with the values, creating maps is thankfully only drawing on a canvas and I can look at scaling stats in easy to read diagrams.
I want to take this opportunity to say a special thanks to my friends and colleagues around me supporting me on this journey, testing the game, discussing issues with me and reporting bugs when they find some in any updates. As much as I programmed everything alone, the strong social network I'm fortunately in made this progress easier and more fun, I can't underestimate how great it is to have people who encourage one to go through the struggle and help if they can.
The game sadly didn't develop as fast as I hoped it would but taking a 6-week break was also necessary, I planed to have finished my fight system, but it's only work in progress. But what features did actually make the List of being called "finished", for this stage of development. I finished 5 out of 8 NPC types and player already can interact with them. Players can travel the world and change maps talking to the Guardian NPC and the wilderness can be created in half an hour. Player can buy, sell and craft items as well equip them, compare them to their quipped equivalents or simply inspect them to learn more about an item, special types of items called "resources" can be collected from the ground with a mostly self explaining UI. Players can withdraw and deposit moneys to banker to secure their money and gain interest over time. For people newer to the gaming world there is a tutorial explaining all the controls in the settings tag. Players can view the map of the location they are currently in to know where to travel to harvest items or shop equipment, and you can meet other player on your way traveling. If you disconnect from the game and rejoin fast enough you maintain your position, or you get spawned at a predetermined spawn point for players so you don't rejoin in the middle of nowhere or a dangerous place. The game tracks your in-game data and now awards achievement for performing certain actions.
To think that these and many more features have been made in only a year time and are still being improved upon is a great motivator but also great for these kind of retrospectives.
But where is the game going? to be honest, I don't know all the details yet. Currently the goal is to finish the fight system and the progress is going well, the data structure stands I'm making a training range V2 to test everything before implementing it into the game, the new maps using the same building blocks as the game can be generated in a (mostly) consistent way and enemies are spawning there as well. The player now has restricted movement so they can only move in their actually walking range per turn to improve UX and make sure Players don't accidentally lose themselves on their own screen, with the release of the fight system the skill tree UI element will also be added for player to explore their abilities. But when this release is done, I probably have to decide between multiple things to do, for now I'll let that rest in the future.
I hope you will have as much fun with the game as I had creating it. There is still lots of stuff to come, like quests, tons of visuals, guilds, friendships, new NPCs, new map types and much more. But as mentioned before these are future topics, for now I hope you had fun trying all the stuff which is already in the Game.
Lastly another very special thanks to two developers who supported me through my journey, be it discussing issues or testing features. Check them out they make great stuff too.
Aaron:
Linktree